Files
firezone/rust/gateway
Thomas Eizinger 533f4c319b feat(connlib): gracefully shutdown connections (#10076)
Right now, connections cannot be actively closed in Firezone. The
WireGuard tunnel and the ICE agent are coupled together, meaning only if
either one of them fails will we clean up the connection. One exception
here is when the Client roams. In that case, the Client simply clears
its local memory completely and then re-establishes all necessary
connections by re-requesting access.

There are three cases where gracefully closing a connection is useful:

1. If an access authorization is revoked or expires and this was the
last resource authorisation for that peer, we don't currently remove the
connection on the Gateway. Instead, the Client is still able to send
packets by they'll be dropped because we don't have a peer state
anymore.
1. If a Gateway gets restarted due to e.g. an upgrade or other
maintenance work, it loses all its connections and every Client needs to
wait for the ICE timeout (~15 seconds) before it can establish a new
one.
1. If a Client has its access revoked for all resources it has access to
in a particular site we also don't remove this connection, even though
it has become practically useless.

All of these cases are fixed with this PR. Here we introduce a way to
gracefully shutdown a connection without forcing the other side into an
ICE timeout. The graceful connection shutdown works by introducing a new
"goodbye" p2p control protocol message. Like all our p2p control
protocol messages, this is based on IP and therefore delivery is not
guaranteed. In other words, this "goodbye" message is sent on a
best-effort basis.

In the case of shutdown, the Gateway will wait for all UDP packets to be
flushed but will not resend them or wait for an ACK.

If either end receives such a "goodbye" message, they simply remove the
local peer and connection state just as if the connection would have
failed due to either ICE or WireGuard. For the Client, this means that
the next packet for a resource will trigger a new access authorization
request.
2025-09-01 06:30:13 +00:00
..

gateway

This crate houses the Firezone gateway.

Building

You can build the gateway using: cargo build --release --bin firezone-gateway

You should then find a binary in target/release/firezone-gateway.

Running

The Firezone Gateway supports Linux only. To run the Gateway binary on your Linux host:

  1. Generate a new Gateway token from the "Gateways" section of the admin portal and save it in your secrets manager.
  2. Ensure the FIREZONE_TOKEN=<gateway_token> environment variable is set securely in your Gateway's shell environment. The Gateway requires this variable at startup.
  3. Set FIREZONE_ID to a unique string to identify this gateway in the portal, e.g. export FIREZONE_ID=$(head -c 32 /dev/urandom | sha256sum | cut -d' ' -f1). The Gateway requires this variable at startup. We recommend this to be a 64 character hex string.
  4. Now, you can start the Gateway with:
firezone-gateway

If you're running as a non-root user, you'll need the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability to open /dev/net/tun. You can add this to the gateway binary with:

sudo setcap 'cap_net_admin+eip' /path/to/firezone-gateway

Ports

The gateway requires no open ports. Connections automatically traverse NAT with STUN/TURN via the relay.